- Created:
- 12th August, 2008
The new desktop grid
Changes include:
- Multi-monitor support
- Aspect ratio of the screen is kept when zoomed out
- Borders around desktops [Configurable]
- Display desktop names [Configurable]
- Ability to manually change the desktop layout [Configurable]
- Custom zoom durations [Configurable]
- Windows are kept on the top of the stack after moving
- “Soft” highlighting of desktops (Slowly fades in and out as you move the mouse)
- No more user input glitching during animations
- Don’t show the grid if there is only one desktop
- Slide effect split into its own plugin
Now all we really need to work out is how to get present windows working at the same time. Über window switcher here we come. ;-)
In other KWin news
- The hidden thumbnails advanced option has been expanded slightly. Now there are three choices: Always (Use this if you want live previews of minimized windows in taskbar thumbnails), shown windows (The new default), and never.
- Don’t like cubes? Use a sphere instead.
- Ozone window decoration synced with Oxygen, no more rectangle borders around buttons.
- OpenGL mode now correctly renders translucent windows (For example the panel).
Comments
12th August, 2008Jonathan Thomas
Awesome! Desktop effects will be awesome (-er) in 4.2!
12th August, 2008mag
great!
can we get a diff or possibly a backport for 4.1?
12th August, 2008moltonel
Very nice to see more polish there, thanks :)
To be finnicky : maybe the black background needs to be replaced with something theme-dependent ?
On a more personal-itch note, I never liked the cube and fear I wont like the sphere better : it doesn’t match how I view virtual desktops in my head at all. And kwin’s current default of moving the windows without moving the background is equally disturbing. I imagine others feel the same ?
What I would look cool and natural is to use the desktop grid to switch desktops in one keystroke : press Ctrl+F2, kwin begins a zoom out à la desktop grid while also homing on the target desktop, and start zooming back in once it’s halfway thru. Wouldn’t it be nice ? ;) Kudos to the KDE devs that’d implement this :)
12th August, 2008rudoolph
wow, this is really cool and “kde4 native”.
great job.
12th August, 2008maninalift
present windows at the same time, cool. I never thought of that before. Chances are it could be unusable on the most awesome displays, but I’d like to try it.
12th August, 2008Karthik Periagaram
Oh yes, that looks nice. When KDE4 allows us to set different wallpapers for different desktops, this will look amazing - imagine a four-piece picture that finally makes sense in the Grid View… Dibs on the Let It Be album cover… :)
12th August, 2008Harald Hvaal
Great work! But question!
12th August, 2008kwilliam
AWESOME!!!! Thanks for making KWin so cool!
12th August, 2008Lucas Murray
Backporting is up to the distro. Changes were made to the effects API to support the new version so it cannot be officially backported.
Eventually there will be a skydome that the user can change and all zooming effects will use that.
OS X already has this feature and I suppose whether it’s usable or not depends on how many windows you have open, the resolutions of your screens and the way you mentally remember where windows are.
This wish is still on the TODO, in the meantime the only way to move maximized windows is through the right-click sticky.
The desktop grid only redraws when something on the screen has changed, how often this happens depends on how broken other applications are.
12th August, 2008Kishore
How about integration with “Activity” of plasma. I know there are plans for this but not sure if the implementation lies with plasma of kwin. I would imagine that it requires kwin API support and is implemented in plasma.
What would be really cool is the ability to have multiple desktops for multiple screens and the ability to have multiple themes (and plasma widgets) for each of the virtual desktop and/or screens.
By the way, i would imagine implementing the above to be a usability nightmare if the configuration for it is not intuitive enough!
13th August, 2008Jonas
I must have misunderstood something in regards to the “dragging of maximized windows” question/TO DO thing. Because if I didn’t, it doesn’t need to be on a TODO list. For me it already works.
Although you do need to activate two things in Systemsettings (in Window behavior)
Works fine for me using 4.1.
14th August, 2008anon
“Multi-monitor support” Does this mean TwinView works now? or is that xinerama?
Best regards
15th August, 2008Lucas Murray
As far as I’m aware this is already planned.
The moving of maximized windows refers to when the “Allow resizing and moving of maximized windows” setting is disabled, if it is enabled then as far as KWin is concerned the window is not “maximized” but rather just the same size as the screen and as thus allowing normal window movement both in effects and out.
nVidia’s TwinView and ATI’s Big Desktop are both Xinerama implementations and are all included (As well as the official Xinerama extension) in my reference of “multi-monitor”. “Multihead” setups (I.e. not Xinerama) on the other hand are still not officially supported.
19th August, 2008Kelvie Wong
I’d just like to say, great job!
The desktop grid is by far the most useful and thus most abused desktop effect by me, and it was a very pleasant surprise when I compiled trunk a few days back, press my usual shortcut key, and be presented with this :)
Things like this will really help KDE out-shine our competition.
26th August, 2008jospoortvliet
Very nice work. Just one suggestion: it’d be cool if the desktop grid would work for switching desktops like the alt-tab now can work for switching windows… so ctrl-tab (which I use for next desktop) shows’em all while holding ctrl, but if you click it fast, it just slides to the next desktop. Or cubes that way, of course, if that’s default…
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